Gadgetory

welcome to a very exciting unboxing this is the all-new geforce gtx 660ti and this particular one is actually pretty special this is MSI's power edition of the part which features their triple overvoltage enhanced pwm design as well as their twin frozer for cooler which is the as you might be able to guess fourth iteration of their twin frozer cooler peter froze there is a funny thing because when I first heard of a twin frozer cool cooler I was like oh they spelled it wrong because it's fr o z R and I was like like you know you were they paying like a consultancy firm like per character to come up with the name for it or something and then you know I just I kind of got used to it and at this point I just I don't care anymore because a Twin Frozr just basically means it's like an awesome dual fan cooler and so I don't worry too much about like if it's spelled correctly or not so I mean that's the thing about branding is you know like what's a Kijiji but if you get used to it long enough and it just doesn't really matter anymore anyway I digress let's talk about graphics cards so this is based on Nvidia sgk 104 chip which are the first time in my memory anyway is the for the first time we're seeing the same chip that's featured in their high-end suit like flagship single GPU products their dual GPU product now in an x6 something product level so this is a mid-range card in terms of the price point that we're gonna see well the mid-range like still a gamer level card but but it's it's more of like a mainstreaming rather than an enthusiast class card but it's using the same GPU with the same technology as the 680 the 690 and the 670 it's got even the clock speeds are the same actually let's say we have clock speeds on here so the reference cards will have the same clock speeds as a GeForce GTX 670 with the only difference being a 192 bit memory bus as compared to a 256-bit memory bus on the GTX 670 so you got two gigs of gddr5 memory due to invidious and innovative memory controller that allows them to still get this nice even 2 gig number in spite of the the memory bus which would normally have limited them to an either 1.5 gig memory configuration or a 3 gate memory configuration you've also got a lot of technology that gets carried over from those basically everything from those higher-end cards including GPU boost which dynamically adjusts the GPU clock speeds depending on the load that's being put on the card and how much power is being drawn from the cards so that you're always getting the highest performance you can in the applications that demand it sorry I'm gonna key I'm gonna keep going with the stuff on the box but I want to start getting this card open here so that you guys can check it out because I am extremely excited about the GeForce 660ti and particularly the power Edition from MSI due to their triple lumen voltage design so here I'll let you guys sort of stare at the board a little bit with the slicks assistance while I talk about some of the other technology that's being carried over from previous edition cards so here's a big one adaptive vsync so adaptive vsync basically gives you the best of both worlds when your framerate goes above the refresh rate of your monitor adaptive vsync will turn vsync on which will give you which will reduce the amount of terrible eliminate tearing which is when you turn around and you see half of the image was drawn while you were looking over here and the other half is drawn while you're looking slightly over here so we don't quite meet up in the middle or up here somewhere and that's a big problem and then what's great about adaptive vsync is it turns it off as soon as you get at or below the refresh rate of the monitor so that benefit of that is that when you have vsync on you have to be at an even multiple of no not a multiple divisor a factor I think it's a factor of the refresh rate of the matter or whatever okay that time something has to multiply the refresh rate so you if you're at refresh rate of 60 for your monitor you have to run at 30fps as opposed to 45 so it'll knock you down to a lower frame rate so what it does is it turns it off to prevent that from happening so that's good stuff as well GPU boost is amazing performance per watt as well as class-leading idle power consumption which to me is one of the most important things about it because even the most hardcore gamer still checks facebook and email and doesn't necessarily game all the time so having a video card that doesn't kick out a ton of heat and doesn't consume a ton of power when you're not actually playing video games is very very important to me you can have a look at the twin frozen cooler well I checked my notes so you've got full support for video 3d vision surround running off of a single card you've got support for TxAA so TxAA is basically a much a much better way of doing anti-aliasing so NVIDIA has incorporated a variety of different approaches to get you significantly better image quality without necessarily the same level of performance hit that we've seen in the past and what TxAA does is it offers a higher level of quality of filtering than has previously been achievable they're not all games support it but like any new technology we will eventually see it continue to move forward FXAA is of course high quality anti-aliasing not quite the same as NSAA but with a much lower performance hit compared to a more traditional anti-aliasing so if you don't know what anti-aliasing is well Google is your friend but we're gonna focus on this this card and other aspects of it for now so Twin Frozr for cooler lots of different technologies so you've got your dual fans you got your propeller blades which with these coatings at the end actually reduce the amount of noise they make as well as improve the amount of airflow that they push due to the design of the blade also they've added dust repellent technology which gets the fan to spin the opposite way the first and when it's first turned on to pull some of the dust out of the fins before it reverses direction and pushes air back through the fin so this keeps dust from settling on the fins and means you won't have to clean your video card as often if at all using this technology so Twin Frozr for cooler yeah what else what else do we have to say about high yes super pipes so these ones out here the peat pipes that have to carry the heat farthest away from the GPU out to the very edges of the cooler those ones are using thicker heat pipes whereas the ones that are right over the GP itself and aren't carrying heat very far using thinner heat pipes that way they're using the more expensive thicker heat pipes in the areas where you really have to work harder to move the heat away from the GPU and spread it out to the radiator which covers almost the entire card speaking of things that cover almost the entire cart you can see there's a yuna sink right here instead of putting it you know lots of gamers love back plates so you know they see the plate that's covering almost the entirety of the cart including all the VRM as well as the RAM modules and see this fold right here this gives the card a lot of rigidity so lots of gamers love backsides because they can make the card look pretty slick and sexy but there's a problem with back plates and that is that as soon as you add a little bit more height to the back of the card you are reducing the compatibility with multi-gpu configurations a lot of the time you take two cards of the back plate you try and put them side-by-side and you don't try us-ally or whatever other config you want and you go home all of a sudden your cards are kind of like like this away from each other because those back plates don't leave enough space and the size approach is to build in this unit sink which gives a lot of the benefits of the back plate including cooling many of the components you can see with their custom PCB all the components except for a couple memory modules or on the other side of the card okay so you're getting the cooling benefit besides you're getting the active cooling from the fan anyway if anything there should be more benefit to doing it this way you're also getting that extra rigidity to the card this card has almost no flex so you get same benefit that you'd get from a backplate except that you're putting it on the front and you still maintain a very clean look and all of that good stuff it's just a matter of where they put that plate of metal so in terms of physic other physicality the card pretty much what you've come to expect I mean it's using the same GPU most of the same technology as a six seventy or six eighty so you've got dual DVI HDMI and DisplayPort out again supporting Nvidia 3d vision surround off of a single card you've got two sli figured fingers meaning you're gonna have support for at least three way graphics card configurations which is again very unexpected for what would normally be more of a mid-range gaming level graphics card PCI Express 3.0 is fully supported by this card two PCIe six pin power connectors it's a very power efficient card in fact I'm surprised they even need two of them to be to be perfectly blunt and which leads us to the most important things about this card so number one is something you can't really see that well because there's nothing on the back of the card and this heat spreader covers all of the PWM for the card you can't really see anything but it uses a five plus two phase power design compared to the four plus two phase power design of a reference card that means better stability and overclocking and in theory better better over clocks which leads us to the single most important thing about the power Edition and that is the fact that it features triple over voltage triple over voltage is MSI's sort of branding marketing speak thing for the ability to over volt the core the PLL and the memory now I'm gonna let that sink in for a second there won't be another gtx 660ti at launch that allows over volting the core which means that as long as you've got decent cooling on this card this will be the 660ti that will overclock better than any other card now this is only the unboxing I haven't tested yet and I do have a power Edition triple overvoltage cart and I have another one that I'm going to be testing head-to-head to find out if there's an actual benefit do you get higher boost clocks from using triple / voltage versus from not using it so I'm very excited to check that out but I'm confident enough that we're gonna see the results that I'm gonna go ahead and say it now you guys are gonna want to use MSI Afterburner to overclock your gtx 660ti power edition with triple over voltage and if you want the most performance per dollar out of a 660ti this will be the way to go thank you for checking out my unboxing their first look at the six gtx 660ti power edition from msi and don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from our unboxings reviews and have their computer videos and I forgot to cover the DVI to vga adapter to dual molex to 6-pin PCI power connectors and a quick users guide download of course the latest drivers from the Nvidia website rather than using this disc and I'll thank you for bearing with me when I forget things